The disagreement was strategic rather than fundamental, but it left Walker somewhat isolated from the organized suffrage movement’s mainstream for much of the late nineteenth century. She had more influence and better reception in England, where she lectured and was received with serious attention. In America she was often dismissed as an eccentric — the woman in the man’s suit who kept wearing her medal.
## The 1916-1917 Review: How 911 Medals Were Rescinded
In June 1916, Congress acted on a question that had been accumulating for years: the Medal of Honor had been awarded under varying standards across five decades, and there was institutional concern that some of those awards — particularly early ones from the Civil War — did not reflect the kind of distinguished valor the medal was meant to represent.
Congress directed the Army to establish a board to review “past awards or issue of the so-called congressional medal of honor.” The board that formed consisted of five retired generals. Its charge was to examine every Medal of Honor award since the Civil War and assess whether the recipients met the standards that Congress had been progressively sharpening through legislation in 1862, 1863, and 1904.
The board worked through 1916 and into 1917. Its findings were released on February 5, 1917. It rescinded the medals of 911 individuals.
The number is striking in its size, but the breakdown is important for understanding what actually happened. The largest single group — 864 of the 911 — were members of the 27th Maine Infantry Regiment. These men had received the medal in 1863 through what amounted to a clerical error or administrative mistake: the medal had been offered as an inducement for the regiment to extend its service past its enlistment date, and when the regiment did not collectively extend, the medals were distributed anyway to those who had, without the individual review that was meant to precede an award. The board found this mass distribution had not met proper standards.